Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse

Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by Macha on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @06:23PM (#14251169)

Not the parent poster, but going to the first Discourse forum in my history:

http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i

72 requests, 50s load time, 3.5mb data. It would have been smaller if you'd served the screenshot of the page.

HN for comparison:

http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN

6 requests, 50kb, 0.72s

Now how about your contemporary forum competition.

Here's a Xenforo forum:

http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png

19 requests, 2mb, 5s

And that's with the massive background image you can see, which is 1mb in size by itself.

EDIT:

Since Jeff stated the comparisons weren't apples to apples, xenforo.com/community vs meta.discourse.org . Both boards running in basically stock configuration from their own sites:

* Xenforo.com: 43 requests, 1.4mb, 4s

* meta.discourse.org: 73 requests: 3.2mb, 4.5s

http://imgur.com/a/SihGh

Definitely a better showing than the ACEO forums, but still loses the comparison.

Too lazy to take more screenshots, but reddit is 50 requests, 1.3mb, 3s for comparison.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse by codinghorror on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:03PM (#14251485)

This isn't remotely apples to apples; for example, HN has zero avatars, Xenforo has zero avatars, whereas Discourse shows up to five avatars per topic, of which there are many on the homepage.

I'm unclear where you are getting 3.2MB from, since sorting by filesize, here are the largest network requests at meta.discourse.org:

http://imgur.com/8v4Fp4L

As you can see, starting at 11.5kb and below it's all images (avatars).

I suppose you could try with images disabled. If you want to make a case that 'not showing avatars by default uses less bandwidth', then I guess I can agree with that. But these images won't affect actual load time, as images rez in later, and all the dimensions are set on the page.

[ Parent | on HN ]